Using information on birth and kindergarten start dates to generate an exogenous measure of the relative age of a student's peer group, we find that, controlling for age, females with older peers are more likely to use substances than females with younger peers. Because there is no reason to suspect that birth and kindergarten start dates should be correlated with the choice of school, the socioeconomic status of a child's peers, or neighborhood unobservables, we view our results with regard to females as providing support for the idea that peer behavior can be contagious. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This paper explores the effects of peers, friends, family, IQ, and academic performance, observed in the last year of high school, on earnings at ages 35 and 53. All significantly affect earnings at both ages. The effects of IQ are much smaller than asserted in, for example, The Bell Curve, and badly overstated in the absence of controls for family, wider context, or academic performance. Aspirations appear to be very important. Socialization and role models may be as well, but not ability spillovers. Feasible increases in academic performance and education can compensate for the effects of many cognitive and contextual deficits.

Thirty-six states have legalized medical marijuana and 18 states have legalized the use of marijuana for recreational purposes. In this paper, we review the literature on the public health consequences of legalizing marijuana, focusing on studies that have appeared in economics journals as well as leading public policy, public health, and medical journals. Among the outcomes considered are: youth marijuana use, alcohol consumption, the abuse of prescription opioids, traffic fatalities, and crime. For some of these outcomes, there is a near consensus in the literature regarding the effects of medical marijuana laws (MMLs). As an example, leveraging geographic and temporal variation in MMLs, researchers have produced little credible evidence to suggest that legalization promotes marijuana use among teenagers. Likewise, there is convincing evidence that young adults consume less alcohol when medical marijuana is legalized. For other public health outcomes such as mortality involving prescription opioids, the effect of legalizing medical marijuana has proven more difficult to gauge and, as a consequence, we are less comfortable drawing firm conclusions. Finally, it is not yet clear how legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes will affect these and other important public health outcomes. We will be able to draw stronger conclusions when more posttreatment data are collected in states that have recently legalized recreational marijuana. (JEL I12, I18, K32, K42, R41)

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Abstract In 1966, Southern hospitals were barred from participating in Medicare unless they discontinued their longstanding practice of racial segregation. Using data from five Deep South states and exploiting county-level variation in Medicare certification dates, we find that gaining access to an ostensibly integrated hospital had no effect on Black postneonatal mortality. Similarly, there is little evidence that the campaign contributed to the trend towards in-hospital births among Southern Black mothers. These results are consistent with descriptions of the hospital desegregation campaign as producing only cosmetic changes and illustrate the limits of anti-discrimination policies imposed upon reluctant actors.

Exploiting variation across states and municipalities in the timing and details of midwifery laws introduced during the period 1900–1940 and using data assembled from various primary sources, we find that requiring midwives to be licensed reduced maternal mortality by 7%–8% and may have led to modest reductions in infant mortality. These estimates represent the strongest evidence to date that licensing restrictions can improve the health of consumers and are directly relevant to ongoing policy debates on the merits of licensing midwives.